Jordan says SARS-like virus deaths isolated cases

December 2, 2012

Jordan's health minister has said that two deaths in the kingdom from a SARS-like virus earlier this year which were confirmed by the World Health Organisation last week were isolated cases.

"Since April, the health ministry has not recorded any case of the coronavirus in Jordan," Abdullatif Wreikat said in comments carried by the official Petra news agency on Sunday.

The WHO reported that as of Friday two deaths in Jordan were among five confirmed deaths from the new virus in the Middle East this year.

"These cases were discovered through testing of stored samples from a cluster of pneumonia cases that occurred in April 2012," the UN agency said.

Wreikat said that Jordan carried out its own tests at the time when two doctors and nine nurses at a state hospital in the city of Zarqa east of Amman all came down with pneumonia, and a nurse and a university student died.

The UN health agency said Wednesday it knew of no more cases in the Gulf of a mystery illness from the same virus family as the deadly SARS but was advising Saudi Arabia ahead of the upcoming Hajj pilgrimage.

(AP)—Saudi Arabia's Health Ministry has confirmed that a second person in the kingdom has contracted a new respiratory virus related to SARS, bringing to three the number of those sickened by it in the Gulf region in recent ...

Recommended for you

A two-step regimen of experimental vaccines against Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) prompted immune responses in mice and rhesus macaques, report National Institutes of Health scientists who designed the vaccines. ...

Conventional wisdom has it that the more people stay within their own social groups and avoid others, the less likely it is small disease outbreaks turn into full-blown epidemics. But the conventional wisdom is wrong, according ...

Researchers from the University of Sydney have painted the most detailed picture to date of major infectious diseases shared between wildlife and livestock, and found a huge gap in knowledge about diseases which could spread ...

The first genetic study of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) to include individuals from diverse populations has shown that the regions of the genome underlying the disease are consistent around the world. This study, conducted ...